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[Necro910]

Pumps train too

They train !!Elves!! too.

[lanceleoghauni]

Presumably the water'd put them out, unless you're pumping magma. and Pumps can't be used by elves, their girlish figure can't withstand the strain.

[Necro910]

Presumably the water'd put them out, unless you're pumping magma. and Pumps can't be used by elves, their girlish figure can't withstand the strain.

You need to use more magma.

[lanceleoghauni]

Somewhere around here there's a guy with a quote of mine in his sig about magma...

It's like my old sensei used to say when I was learning Dwarf Fortress.

"Everything can be solved by magma"

"But sensei! my dwarves are burning alive and it's barely even hurting the Zombie hordes!"

"SILENCE! you are not using enough magma."

Oh, Here it is.

[Syrup Roast]

If you're properly creative, any number of things can be automated.  One fantastic ideas of mine is to place a sandbag stockpile in a room.  One end of this room is a pit.  On the other side, the adjacent room is a tall water reservoir.  At the TOP of this reservoir (built on a small floor tile overhanging the interior) is a pressure plate set to activate on 7/7 water.  This plate is linked to the doors/floodgates at the bottom.  Thus, it will fill up slowly, preferably catching the run-off of your mist generators, and once it fills to the top it will open itself up, allowing the water to flow into the sandbag area and push it all down the pit and down to the magma forges.  For OSHA purposes you can build grates over the pit area.  For DWARF purpose, you could not.  It's not the fasted method, but it's automated and runs off waste water that doesn't have to flow very quickly.

fridge question. Won't the haulers just go down the magma workshops and bring the sandbags back all the way up to the stockpile for flushing?

[Girlinhat]

Not if they fall on top of or right beside a sand stockpile, in which case they'll move it to the closest stockpile.  I -think- you and make a stockpile atop a floor grate, but don't quote me there...

[Noir]

Woah woah woah!! So many replies, I can't read them all while at work. Little by little...

Here's what you do:

Build a normal furnace near the sand, set a job to collect sand there on repeat.  Have a stockpile nearby for the sand collector to deposit the sand in.  Down near the magma furnace, set another sand stockpile to take sand from the other stockpile.  That way, your haulers will be hauling sand down while one guy works on collecting sand and another can work on turning it into glass.

This is exactly what I'm doing right now; I was trying something more efficient.

[zephyr_hound]

Why don't you just bring the magma up rather than bringing the sand down?? Assuming your fort is nearer to the surface than the magma sea, it will speed things up more anyway. Took me an ingame year to build a double-stacked pump tower powerful enough to get it up 45 z-levels and fill the moat, so with single pump tower I assume 90 levels for a smaller amount of magma could be done in the same time with enough mechanics/architects. (TIP: build temporary/removable gears as support on each level first so you can designate multiple pumps without causing a collapse due to hanging machinery)

Of course if the reason you need the sand is so you can make pump components for a magma pump tower...

[Triaxx2]

That's usually the reason.

How about a pump draw hatch system. Vertical bars, pumps to pull the water and thus the items up against the bars so they're sitting on the hatches, then open the hatches and engage a second set of pumps, in a stack, which refills the reservoir and also drains the bag lift to gently lower the bags to the lowest floor.

Or you could just kick some dorfs down the pit and toss the bags in to give them a nice soft landing. (The bags get the soft landing, into the dorf splat that is.)

[Girlinhat]

Objects will pass through a vertical grate if being pushed by a fluid, a well known bug.  But, you could place the hatch directly in front of the pump, so that the water current drags it to the pump, and thus to the hatch.

[Naz]

Not sure if someone answered this already but I did some !!SCIENCE!! and found out the following. Once a tree is cut down the tile under it will be sand or possibly whatever soil the surface is made of. My underground tree farm in Girderjail inadvertently became my sand collection area one day when I realized this. I now no longer have to go to the surface or anywhere near it to feed my glass furnaces. Also my tree farm was built on smoothed stone that I'd flooded then drained to create mud. He same concept seems to apply to not just trees but any plant that grows naturally on that tile.

Edit: how's it going Noir? Haven't seen you on here since your last thread about starting a fort.

[Quietust]

Unfortunately, attempting to dump the sand bags will result in the sand being dumped on the ground and the empty bag tossed in the hole.

*ahem*

WRONG!

It is 100% possible to dump sand bags and have them safely land at the bottom of the pit without the sand falling out. What you were doing was dumping the sand from the bags by using d-b-d to designate them for dumping - you either need to use [k][d] to dump each sand bag individually, or you need to go into Z-Stocks and unforbid all of the sand from the Powder section before unpausing.

[lanceleoghauni]

is it bad that I got that WRONG, soundbyte in my head when I read that?

[Syrup Roast]

is it bad that I got that WRONG, soundbyte in my head when I read that?

actually I heard the guy from 2 Stupid Dogs.

[Triaxx2]

Actually, a repeating hatch that drops them one Z-level should turn trick.